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BBEdit 14

barebones.com

71–80 of 164 posts

Re: BBEdit 14

#71

Can someone here explain to me the appeal of BBEdit? I’ve tried using it several times but it never clicked with me. (I’m an Emacs user.)

I use it as my main visual plain text editor, but use vi on the CLI and JetBrains stuff for coding. The use cases I like it for:

- copy/paste ANYTHING, every tried to copy something from the browser and paste it to the CLI and nothing happens? Anytime I have difficulty pasting text, I paste into BBEdit first and then copy it again to paste into its destination. BBEdit eats any kind of text, it's amazing.

- Large files, I've found nothing is faster for opening and editing large file >1G

- Note taking - Has a few advantages over other options (Bear, Notes, Evernote) here that I don't miss the rich text features of those others. 1) No automatic autocorrect for spelling but the manual autocorrect is still there which means I can write tech jargon without getting frustrated 2) Autosave without having to think of a title or folder 3) Immediate start up time, no waiting for the doc to load even if I have >100 open docs

- batch text processing - if I need to do find/replace I tend to go with BBEdit over CLI, I can build up the regex pattern and have undo capability. Use it a lot for making SQL statements from lists of ids and the like.

Re: BBEdit 14

#72
post #58
post #8

Thanks to using BBEdit for a decade now, I get bitterly disappointed whenever I re-open an application and it doesn't restore the windows and state it had when it closed. I've tried switching to both Emacs and Vim, but no amount of configuration nor third-party plugins could get them to work like this effectively. BBEdit works exactly how I want it to work out of the box, and I commend it for that.

Be careful what you wish for. I use one application which does not check whether the computer goes from 2 external monitors to the built-in laptop monitor. When I reopen the app on the laptop without the external monitors, all of its windows are drawn completely off the screen. The only way I know how to fix this is to reattach the external monitors, move the windows to the built-in screen, then close the app again.

Shouldn't your window manager give you a way to handle this?

Re: BBEdit 14

#73
Instabuy. BBEdit is the one app that has been on every Mac I've ever owned, since the 1990s in fact. No other Mac app I know has existed that long. It has always been rock solid and reasonably priced. I happily buy upgrades when they come out every few years. Thank you, Bare Bones, for staying the course!

Re: BBEdit 14

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the main reason BBEdit has been with me for a decade. I have NEVER lost an unsaved document during that whole time. You quit BBEdit or restart or crash macOS but they're always there when you're back in. Insanely robust. Is there anything like it on Linux?

Vim (cross-platform) supports ability to restore from the "swap" file (by default, AFAIK, but that may very well be a special configuration decision by my distro). If your system crashes or you lose power while editing foo.src, it will leave the swap file behind, which is eagerly written to disk while editing and only removed when the process shuts down gracefully. When you bring your system back up and try to edit f…

What is the performance cost of this sort of thing? I suppose it depends on how often it autosaves, but if it's too infrequent you end up loosing work anyway, and you could imagine it being a problem for files above a certain size.

Re: BBEdit 14

#75
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol! Same here. I want them to have some paid lite mode, that I could purchase and support them. Given my use case I feel like $40 is a bit much but I’d gladly pay $20 for a note taking app.

Didn't they have TextWrangler for this?

AFAIK, TextWrangler has been discontinued in favor of BBEdit.

On another note, I just found out that the Notes feature is indeed Premium one. Hmmm.

Re: BBEdit 14

#76
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the main reason BBEdit has been with me for a decade. I have NEVER lost an unsaved document during that whole time. You quit BBEdit or restart or crash macOS but they're always there when you're back in. Insanely robust. Is there anything like it on Linux?

Visual Studio Code has yet to lose workspaces, untitled documents or unsaved changes for me. What is more likely to happen for me is accidentally running Git commands while I had buffers in VSCode with unsaved changes.

I ran into this issue [0] when updating VSCode which caused it to delete the contents of my unsaved/untitled document.

[0]https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/69972

Re: BBEdit 14

#77

Can someone here explain to me the appeal of BBEdit? I’ve tried using it several times but it never clicked with me. (I’m an Emacs user.)

A few other points I didn't see anyone mention:

Extensive Applescript support. I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume most HN readers are not fans, and probably those who know any of it hate it. But, BBEdit has great documentation and an extremely solid and comprehensive implementation. It's one of the only Mac apps I truly feel I can do anything at all with in AS.

Shell worksheets. Something of a Mac-only tool, I think. Emacs users won't be impressed, but this feature isn't common on other Mac editors, and I think both camps can agree "why the hell NOT?". Having your shell environment be your text editor is great!

Re: BBEdit 14

#78

Can someone here explain to me the appeal of BBEdit? I’ve tried using it several times but it never clicked with me. (I’m an Emacs user.)

I've been using BBEdit since v4.0. One thing that sticks out for me was, way back in System 7 days, I opened up a huge (for the time) CSV text file to do some search/replace. I don't remember the size, but it was larger than available RAM on the machine, so maybe 20MB. It opened, and I was able to work on it. Recently I had to open a 1GB text file in BBEdit to also do a search/replace. (Not something I could use the…

Are your scripts available somewhere? I would love to take a look at those. Can other languages be used instead of PHP?

Re: BBEdit 14

#79
post #11

> We know that many of our customers create a lot of untitled documents for quick note-taking, and rely on BBEdit's legendary stability and robust crash recovery to protect their work. We've added a new "Notes" feature in BBEdit 14... Ooh, guilty as charged. I see an "Untitled text 931". It's a list of hostnames. "Untitled text 107" is a Beef & Broccoli recipe.

Notepad++ on Windows has been the standard bearer for this functionality for quite a long time.

Second this. Other products have it as well but Notepad++ has worked very reliably for me.

Re: BBEdit 14

#80
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol! Same here. I want them to have some paid lite mode, that I could purchase and support them. Given my use case I feel like $40 is a bit much but I’d gladly pay $20 for a note taking app.

Didn't they have TextWrangler for this?

Yeah - it's worth pointing out that BBEdit itself, can partly be used for free, indefinitely. You're allowed access to a subset of features (which is very similar to what TextWrangler offered), without needing to pay.

I think they reached a point where, even if the codebase had originally been forked from BBEdit, it was just plain dangerous to have a second codebase floating around. I think after they had done the same work (bugfixes, feature additions) twice for quite a while, they just decided "yeah, this was a mistake", and pulled the plug.

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